Heaven's Bride

by Leigh Eric Schmidt

  Craddock’s long list of taboos was regularly at cross-purposes with facilitating one of her most fetishized goals: female orgasm. Needless to say, her multiple anxieties about the clitoris made cunnilingus off limits as well, erecting another hurdle for the ardent husband gamely pursuing his wife’s sexual satisfaction. So fearful indeed were such oral-genital acts that Craddock avoided them as unmentionables in her shorter published manuals and took them up only briefly in her big manuscript on “The Marriage Relation.” There the topic arose primarily as fellatio—“that widespread sex perversion which in modern times is termed the French method.” As Craddock saw it, all too many men had been exposed to that method through frequenting prostitutes, leaving virtuous wives at a severe disadvantage to compete with such “abominable allurements.” Cunnilingus, she thought, was a comparably rarer but equally perverse practice. A woman’s desire for it was mainly a result of a husband’s failure to satisfy her in the proper way. Marital relations had to be improved, in this case to defend against the immoral enticements of prostitution and the perversion of approved forms of sexual expression. Simply put, Craddock saw oral sex as off limits; it needed to be resisted, not indulged.27

  Craddock’ sexual advice carried one more requirement for good behavior: Amid all the mind-body melding in the bedroom, lovers could not talk dirty. Spiritual sex was much too exalted for the bawdy vernacular, especially pronounced in the male sporting culture, that celebrated “good square fucks” or the rough-and-tumble of “fucking matches.” Before and during sex, “do not tell indelicate stories,” Craddock warned. “Shut out the world, with all its baseness, all its impurity,” and rise into a realm of “lofty religious sentiment.” Sexual pleasure was licensed as religious rapture, not as vulgar physicality; as mystical exaltation, not sweaty passion. If all went as Craddock hoped and dreamed, nobody would be fucking at all. Married couples would be devoutly preparing instead for a sacrament, for sharing in “God’s attributes of purity, tenderness, [and] unselfishness.” They would be refined and uplifted, not coarsened and degraded. Theirs would be a mystical marriage—one that preserved them from impurity, perversion, and vulgarity while bringing blissful satisfaction to body and soul.28

  Craddock’s teachings on sexuality—both the dos and the don’ts—always came back, in the end, to religion. For all her scientific posturing—the repeated nods to sexology and evolutionary science— Craddock’s instructions, like Stockham’s, were designed to hold the ground for metaphysical ideals against the determinism of base physical drives. As Craddock succinctly concluded, “The sexual act is . . . in its last analysis, a religious act.” God was to be sought in the very midst of that activity—in effect, through a hallowed ménage a trois in which the divine filled out the threesome. “Not until you make God the third partner, so to say, in your unions,” Craddock claimed, “will you . . . understand the serene and lofty enjoyment of the truly wedded, whose marital embrace is blessed physically, mentally and spiritually by the Power which upholds the universe.” God cared deeply about marriage, about its intimacies and alienations, its satisfactions and inequities; God wanted couples to have no sex of a coercive kind, but much sex of a spiritual kind; and God wanted that in order to share in the grace and ecstasy of the greatest sacrament of all, a married couple’s sexual union. To say that Craddock had a theology of embodiment is not strong enough: She had no theology apart from fleshly incarnation. “It is through the body,” she related, “that the Spirit of God is ever seeking to express itself to the world. And through sex-life most of all.”29

  IT WAS ONE THING FOR Craddock to preach a theology of sexual embodiment, and quite another thing to help people live it out day-to-day or night-to-night. The practical dilemmas she faced in her counseling sessions were sundry, as was evident in an exchange she had with one of her clients. Voicing bafflement at his failure to get in the right frame of mind during intercourse, she pressed him: “You did not fix your thoughts, then, as I told you to do, on the highest power you recognize in the universe, God?” “No,” he replied, “it seems sort of odd, don’t you know, to think of God at that time.” Craddock’s advisees—whether earnest, quizzical, or just curious—pushed back with their own experiences. In moving out of her one-size-fits-all manuals into face-to-face meetings, she navigated a terrain tangled with distinct personal problems, intense relational crises, conflicting religious identities, and erratic sexual impulses. Craddock had turned to personal counseling in part as a way to sidestep Comstock’s control over obscene publications—but there turned out to be nothing secure or predictable about this approach to marriage reform either. Even for a teacher who was quite ready to celebrate creative individuality, Craddock often found the sex lives of her pupils disturbing and filled with intractable challenges.30

  Craddock was convinced that the majority of divorces began in the bedroom. Certainly her “Records of Cases in Marital Reform Work” and her “Record of Cases in Oral Instruction” offered ample substantiation of that proposition. She wanted to help save as many troubled marriages as she could, but the alienations between husband and wife often ran deep. There was the middle-aged lawyer who wanted “to do all he can, quietly, to win his wife all over again,” even though she no longer wanted to have sex with him, “disliked it intensely,” and had of late begun to scream at him whenever he attempted to approach her sexually. The rifts and the betrayals were many. A young factory worker came to her brokenhearted. To help make ends meet, his wife had taken a job as a waitress and had inexplicably decided “to pass as a single woman” at the restaurant. Soon she started carrying on with another man and had now threatened to move out. The desperate husband had turned to Craddock for help.31

  In some disputes Craddock ended up privy to both sides of disagreement. One young man, raised a devout Christian, told her that he had prayed to find “his proper marital partner” and had thought at the time that his prayer had been well answered with his chosen bride. Now he felt utterly disillusioned. His wife had turned out to be quite “excessive in her demands upon him, requiring union about every other night” and had in the process become downright dissatisfied with his performance. Deciding to sample a variety of “illicit relations,” she had cheerily told her husband (or so he reported): “I guess I am a regular whore by nature, and want more than one man.” Since they had two small children, he told Craddock that he did not want a divorce. Instead, he had now determined to give up his scruples about extramarital affairs and embark on his own adventures. Craddock offered some of her standard religious advice and sexual tips, but mostly all she could do was to despair over this hellish descent: “Are not such things sufficient to make one sick at heart for the future of the race!”

  Craddock had various business cards and flyers to advertise her services as an adviser on how to improve marital relations. This is the front and back of one of them that she used in Chicago and Denver. WHi 65508-65509, Wisconsin Historical Society.

  When the man’s slender, dark-haired wife showed up for her own session, however, she hardly seemed the harlot her husband had claimed her to be. Indeed, Craddock’s heart went out to her as the young woman explained that she would be “perfectly content” in her marriage if only her husband would be more affectionate and less given to “business worries when they were embracing in bed.” “Poor woman!” Craddock exclaimed, “I just longed to make him take her in his arms and caress her and love her, love her, love her, in the way a woman wants to be loved.” Craddock’s poignant yearning for the couple’s healing faced long odds against fulfillment. The husband, after all, had resolved to match the wife’s infidelities with his own, a tit-for-tat arrangement that was sure to heighten, not mitigate, their divisions. Further estrangement seemed all but inevitable.32

  Craddock met with many other clients whose marital problems looked much easier to repair than those of the couple whose alienation had turned into unfaithfulness. Take, for example, the youthful pair, married three years, each of whom visited her separa
tely: The wife dreaded the thought of getting pregnant, wanted to avoid sex as much as possible, and could not enjoy it at all; the husband felt ashamed of himself for wanting to have sex with her when he knew that she took no pleasure in it. While he had never visited a prostitute, he often felt that it would actually be the more considerate thing to do given his wife’s anxieties about having sex. Craddock bristled at the suggestion of his resorting to a “harlot”: “I promptly tabooed anything of the sort.” The husband and wife each talked to her, got a copy of Right Marital Living, and went away feeling like Craddock had offered them “a possible solution”: Lots of nude embraces, “night after night, without genital contact,” as a way of building up the affection between them and as a way of alleviating the wife’s fears of getting pregnant. In this instance, both counselor and counselees were hopeful about finding a way out of this marital impasse and were happy with the progress being made.33

  Craddock had other cases that made her feel optimistic about success, but the ones that really weighed on were those involving irresolvable anguish. No one exemplified that more clearly than “Mrs. G,” a middle-aged married woman, with a “sweet face, refined by suffering,” whom Craddock stood ready to help without taking her usual fee. Unfaithful and mean, Mrs. G’s husband had contracted gonorrhea in one of his trysts and passed the disease along to his wife. He had, moreover, committed incest with their daughter from the time she was nine years old, all the while treating his wife with callous indifference. Mrs. G had found out about his sexual violation of their daughter only years later, when the daughter, terminally ill with consumption, “unburdened her soul to her mother.” Never confronting her husband with his guilt, Mrs. G feared that, if he found out that she knew about it, he would kill himself. Craddock noted, as an aside in her case notes, that this would have been “good riddance of bad rubbish,” but she held back from telling that to Mrs. G. Craddock recognized Mrs. G’s case as absolutely critical, a defining moment in her counseling—one that revealed just how necessary and difficult her labors were. “If I helped only this one woman,” Craddock said, then her ministry would all “have been worth while.”

  Despite Craddock’s personal investment in Mrs. G’s case, it would be hard to count this face-to-face instruction a success. Mrs. G had decided that she wanted to try to “save” her husband and told Craddock that she had silently forgiven him for his betrayals. That prayerful decision looked ill-advised, if not masochistic, and yet Craddock consented to Mrs. G’s quiet resolve. Previous to their face-to-face meeting, Mrs. G had heard Craddock give one of her lectures on marital relations and had already decided, based on that talk, to seek “God’s blessing” for the renewal of her marriage, including the spiritualization of her sex life with her husband. Craddock seemed all too pleased to hear that Mrs. G was on this path, even advising her “to put my books” in her husband’s hands. In this harshly abusive case Craddock was, by her own standards, culpably acquiescent. She firmly supported the liberalization of divorce laws and often advised divorce in cases of extramarital affairs, but with Mrs. G she held her tongue: Here was rubbish that needed to be dumped, and yet Craddock declined to recommend that course of action. Perhaps trying to justify her silence—her own failure at truth-telling—Craddock noted that Mrs. G had found some tiny measure of peace in the “grace” of reclaiming her husband. Tribulations like Mrs. G’s, Craddock had decided, could be assuaged only “in the world beyond the grave.” That compensatory gesture was necessarily a tragic deferral, and Craddock, despite her own faith in a spiritualist afterlife, surely knew that.34

  Craddock found herself in similarly treacherous and heartrending territory when cases of same-sex love arose. With one young man, for example, she could tell that she was failing “to touch the deepest chord in his nature” in their session. “I kept feeling around for it, but, apparently, in vain,” Craddock noted. At the close of their exchange, though, he began asking about Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, a formidable European work of sexology known for its detailed categorization of sexual perversions and abnormalities. The young man wanted to know what Craddock thought about Krafft-Ebing’s proposed cures, including the use of hypnotism, and it was at that point Craddock knew she was dealing with “a sexual pervert.” He told her that he wanted to get married, even though he knew that he was not at all attracted to women and was very much in love with another young man. Obsessed with thoughts of “his beloved boy-friend,” he was heartsick that his would-be lover remained infatuated with a girl. He had sought out one treatment after another and appeared to Craddock to be suffering as “would-be ascetics do.” Despite her knee-jerk response to label him a pervert, she could not help but feel for him.

  The emotional intensity of these face-to-face meetings often pushed Craddock to temper her initial, reactive judgments. Seeing how much her pupil was suffering, she kept the conversation going—within herself as well as with him. Craddock urged him to bypass sketchy hypnotists and to go talk to a radical Unitarian minister whom she trusted, Jenkin Lloyd Jones, whose church was a bastion for Emersonian wayfaring and self-exploration. As for her client’s same-sex attraction, she suggested he try to transmute it into a spiritual love and leave off any “bodily caresses.” By thus allowing for the spiritualization of same-sex love, Craddock wanted to remove the “stigma on his desire to feel lovingly toward the boy.” “I told him that he might love him inwardly all he wished,” Craddock noted. But, even as she tried to connect with this young man’s “deepest chord,” she foundered on the limits of what she counted “natural.” When he asked her, “almost pleadingly,” whether he could not just give his beloved “a little hug,” Craddock sternly replied, “No!” Same-sex love might be spiritualized, but it should not be physically expressed.35

  The one other case of same-sex love that Craddock dealt with in detail in her counseling records did not have the same face-to-face intensity, but it still pushed her off her familiar script. A friend of one of her other pupils very much wanted her advice but was too embarrassed to visit on his own and wished to rely on indirect instruction. “With the body of a man, he yet has no liking for women sexually,” Craddock summarized; “all his yearnings are for men.” Tormented and suicidal, he had consorted with prostitutes to try to find arousal with a woman but to no avail. Physicians, likewise, were of no help to him. He had plotted respectability through marriage but broke off the engagement, realizing that he could be happy only with men and that “Nature had evidently made him so.” By the time this man sought advice from Craddock through a friend, he was clearly nearing an option of last resort. Craddock discussed various alternatives out there—an “electric cure” prescribed by one doctor, for example—but mostly she recommended a month of meditation and sexual abstinence. That experiment could serve as a means for the young man to discover for himself the truth about his sexuality. Displaying in this moment a notable elasticity in her approach, Craddock accorded the anonymous inquirer the liberty of self-discernment: “Personally, I believed his friend’s condition to be a perversion,” she concluded; “nevertheless, it might happen that I was wrong, and his friend right, in thinking himself a woman in a man’s body.” Craddock’s solution was not more medical quackery, but a path of intuitive enlightenment.36

  Craddock’s flexibility as a counselor was especially evident in her knack for working across religious lines. She was unfazed by denominational differences, by the escalating diversity of American religious (and irreligious) life. “Young married woman; Roman Catholic; Polish,” so read Craddock’s terse opening to Case 5 in her records. “Was very grateful for my instruction, and especially pleased to find that I treated her religion with respect, and said she would tell her friends about this way that I respected her religion.” Four cases later Craddock was talking easily with a young Baptist woman; she was “deeply impressed by what I said of consecrating the entire life (sexual desires included) to God, and making God the third partner; her eyes glistened as I talked to her.�
� People from a wide variety of religious backgrounds showed up at her office, and Craddock was usually able to step far enough back from her own metaphysical inclinations to offer help.37

  Just as she was happy to work with pupils from different denominations, Craddock was also quite capable of adjusting herself to agnostics and unbelievers. When, for example, an irreligious barber told her, “with a cheery toss of his head,” that his shop was “the highest thing in his thoughts at present” and “pooh-poohed any reference to ‘God’ or the ‘Divine,’” Craddock deftly shifted her approach. Instead of becoming peremptory with him over his joking irreverence, she replaced her usual spiritual language with a discussion of “thought-force” and “the impulsive power of primordial matter.” She would have preferred to talk about “Yoga as Applied to Married Life” or to expound on New Thought metaphysics, which she did, of course, when the opportunity presented itself. What made her especially adept in these sessions, though, was her willingness to wander “to all points of the compass” with her students.38